Following the move from Colorado to Minnesota each year, I make the transition from a homeless service center for adults to a preschool for children staying the a shelter.

This week I made yet another switch, from a morning shift to the afternoon. A friend I'd recruited to replace me Thursday mornings is staying on.

The kids, aged roughly 3 to nearly 5, have been difficult, I'm told. A number of behavior issues. There's a high proportion of boys, including one still there from the group I worked with before I left.

I've always assumed it helps to have men in the classroom as role models, since not all the fathers are with the families in the shelter and the staff is all women, although that's based on a somewhat flawed gender premise. The female teachers are tougher and professionally better equipped than the male volunteers.

The kids just know we're the guys who come in one day. Not that one of us was a bond trader/analyst for an investment bank and the other used to own a marketing agency. We met at a golf club. If we are any kind of role models, our former professional lives won't have much to do with it.

One more difference. The morning shift is much more hyper. The kids have a three-hour series of activities and generally start out with more energy. After lunch, though, there's a two-hour quiet time, where my job is to help children wind down into nap land and calm any kids who are disturbing the others.

Now I'll have to be still for two hours. We're all learning.

Biking in for the first time on my regular commuter route, I was struck by the amount of building that's begun in Minneapolis since I left last November.

Two buildings destroyed by the tornado that hit the neighborhood exactly two years had finally been cleared—a former day care center and a corner commercial building that had housed a barber shop and apartments above. Three of the four corners of that intersection at Golden Valley Road and Penn Avenue are now empty.

A large apartment building damaged by the storm is still shuttered and the apartments are off the market. A recent national study ranked Minnesota's housing least affordable in the Midwest.

Last month, a barber shop that had been nicely outfitted after the storm was burned less than three weeks after the owner joined Facebook and posted photos of the interior. Hmmm.

Things are still not looking great for this neighborhood that supplies our shelter with families who can't find jobs or places they can afford—or places they can afford that are anywhere near their jobs.

Meanwhile, work is proceeding on the Exchange, a big transit hub next to Target Center. Apartments and
condos are sprouting throughout downtown, rushing to meet the rental demands of the well-off and upwardly mobile.

Even more exciting development's on the way. The urban park proposed as
part of the new Vikings complex will be right across the street from
People Serving People, the shelter where I volunteer.

Well, not quite. The shelter residents' view will be blocked
by the new office tower and residential complex planned for the north
edge of the park.

Yesterday's post about Central Corridor parking linked to a story [scroll down to July 22; original Finance and Commerce link is dead] quoting the owner of Swank Retro antiques. He said he has 22 spaces in front of his store, but that will
shrink to three after light rail operation begins.

Perhaps, if you include the spots across four lanes of University.

Here's the actual parking plan [PDF] from the Met Council, which has been shown to the block's business owners. The detail shows that there are 10 spaces planned in front of Alan Guttenfelder's store at 1910 University.

Grey areas show surface parking lots. There are no parking spaces retained on the north side of University.

Over and over we've heard that the Central Corridor light rail line running between St. Paul and Minneapolis will eliminate 85% of on-street parking along University Avenue.

Periodically, I bike commute along University, and since I've done some
consulting related to Central Corridor on business mitigation, I'm
sensitive to impacts on those small businesses that give the street what
vitality it has left.

Today, I rode both ways along University from Stadium Village to Lexington. On my return trip during the lunch hour, I noted one side of one block where the on-street parking spots were taken (outside a pawn shop and outlet store). Another block also came close to being full near KSTP-TV. (It's also close to a limited stop number 50 bus route stop.)

Otherwise, I did not see a block with free or metered parking that came close to being half full with parked cars. Most could easily sustain an 85% on-street parking loss. This is consistent with other informal parking surveys I've taken along that stretch.

Alan Guttenfelder, owner of Swank Retro antiques, said he relies solely
on street parking for his business at 1910 University Ave. W.
Guttenfelder said he has 22 spaces in front of his store, but that will
shrink to three after light rail operation begins.

“We are
really short on parking now,” he said. “There is one-hour parking in
front of my store now because too many people are trying to park there
for extended hours."

Swank Retro is a cool store near Iris Park and Porky's Diner. I won't dispute Guttenfelder's claim about parking's importance to his business. But he's only open there Friday through Sunday, and Monday there were plenty of open spaces.

I seek out gritty, diverse urban streets. I have a high tolerance for decay and an overdeveloped appreciation of the semi-inept underdog. I love that the avenue has the "home of the 30-dollar tire."

But make some slow runs down University Avenue and its shuttered storefronts before you swallow the line that light rail construction will kill University Avenue businesses.

The Strib asks today,"Was cash for clunkers a clunker?" Apparently the pickup crowd was a major beneficiary of the trade-in program designed to help out car companies and put more fuel efficient vehicles on the road. Ford F-150 drivers in particular tended by a wide margin to buy another F-150.

Unintended consequences from good intentions abound in the bailout biz, but once things start to go south, there are also perils in failing to act.

Smart growth advocates have long pointed out the costs of continuing to encourage and even subsidize urban sprawl. The post cogently presents some of the other bad consequences of the housing bubble that only became apparent after it burst. And it has suggestions for smarter policy.

I found myself copying too many sections of the piece to include here, so this is just a taste:

[R]ising housing demand led to construction on the urban fringe.
It also led to higher prices in center cities, which pushed many low-
and middle-income families to move to places with cheaper housing
markets, which increased demand for homes on the fringe and led to even
more construction. Rising demand for exurban living led to construction
of exurban housing, and rising demand for urban living led to construction of exurban housing.

Another way to say this is that
center-city housing markets experienced a correction, while exurban
housing markets entered a vicious cycle leading to wrenching housing
price declines that will likely push prices below replacement costs in
some areas.

This is a dangerous place for neighborhoods to
be. Vacant homes will begin to deteriorate, and occupied homes unlikely
to sell for more than replacement costs (or more than the value of the
owner's mortgage) will suffer from disinvestment. The housing stock
will become second-rate.

As neighborhoods fall apart,
wealthier and more mobile homeowners will move away, while excess
inventory and rock bottom prices will attract
low-income households. The tax base will fall and so services will
decline, and the general desirability of such areas will drop. Some,
and perhaps many, of these neighborhoods will become slums.

[...]

In short, the government isn't just subsidizing sprawl. It's subsidizing the deterioration of sprawling areas.

Once government acts, it's impossible to measure the price of inaction. We can't know if the economy would've gone into a death spiral if lawmakers had stood on the sidelines rooting for the free market to perform the rescue operation.

Critics of government intervention won't have to directly face the question: "what if we'd done nothing?" Instead, they can gather political ammunition without ever having stood in the line of fire.

Meanwhile, those who believe intervention averted disaster should consider the sort of consequences now manifest in the housing market.

Somehow, doing research on rural mail delivery in Colorado, I stumbled across this photo of downtown Minneapolis, 1905, and ended up wandering around for hours in the turn-of-the-century Gateway District. It's worth going to the site where I found it to view the wonderfully detailed original.

The corner in the foreground is South Fourth Street and Second Avenue. The first of three buildings facing Second is a mixed use three-story with tenant laundry on the roof, housing a seller of Gluek's Beer, a pool room and possibly a grocery (another photo I've seen advertised a laundry at the second awning). The Northern Hotel is in the middle and the famed Metropolitan Building dominates the shot.

In the large-format version, you can see how trolleys, horse-drawn wagons and bikes are the main conveyances, though there may be one motor car parked on Fourth. In the lower left, an awning marks a hay store — or maybe that's just the name of the proprietor.

The last building along far end of Fourth is the Wyman Building, which still stands, and I can pick out a few other existing buildings in the Warehouse District, including the Jackson Building and the Colonial Warehouse (home of the city's horse drawn trolley system and site of a recent PARKing Day encampment), with its tall, pale smokestack visible abover the Metropolitan Building.

Like other old sections of American downtowns, the Gateway was a place of magnificent detail, as cluttered and inviting as a Victorian parlor. The buildings visible here [a closer-in, lower view of the same main block], including the Metropolitan bristle with all manner of parapets, cornices, finials, chimneys, fire escapes, towers, domes, and other assorted protrusions [...] It is not a beautiful scene, but this little piece of Minneapolis looks wonderefully appealing, a place where a stroller would never lack entertainment for the eyes.

All of this was erased during the early 1960's urban renewal. But there are few strollers to delight nowadays. It was replaced by a landscape than requires no comment.

This account of small businesses trying to survive anticipated construction of the Central Corridor Light Rail route reminded me of a story I wrote 35 years ago — and what has happened since.

I was freelancing for the Minneapolis Star and for Preview magazine, the Minnesota Public Radio program guide that has long since morphed into "region's most widely circulated lifestyle magazine, catering to a well-educated, affluent audience."

Preview then was edited by writers like Patricia Hampl and covered Minnesota through a very different lens. It published arts and literary reporting, but also my account of the New Ulm anti-draft march and another cover story about urban renewal on the fringes of downtown Minneapolis.

[Photo: Washington Avenue between Marquette and Second Avenues. These buildings were replaced by the unremarkable 100 Washington Square, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who went on to design the World Trade Center. From John McNab's photostream]

It was titled: "Development or Destruction?"

By this time, the early 1970s, most of the city's Washington Avenue skid row had been eradicated, though not much of the promised new development had yet materialized.

The Minneapolis Tribune
editorialized at the time: "The ugliness of blight is ... disappearing
and a new beauty and orderliness replace it." But a local architect
said that it was "the most inexcusable act of civic vandalism in the
history of Minneapolis."

In fact, some of the land that went from flophouse to parking lot is still used for parking cars. A few of the remaining flop houses found new, trendy life, while others are in different states of productive use.

Southwest near Loring Park, where my domestic partner and I lived in those days, the affordable apartments and small businesses were just starting to be exposed to gentrification. New landlords were buying the four-story apartment buildings, buffing them up, and charging much higher rents than we were used to paying. Those higher rents pushed us into home ownership, which turned out to be a good deal.

The city's lead development person at the time told us, when we asked him about what would happen to the area's poor people, "they just go somewhere else." And indeed they did.

For small businesses, though, relocation is another matter.

I interviewed some business owners whose buildings in the neighborhood were going under the wrecking ball. A used bookstore owner had been moved to his current location after the city demolished his previous building, to which he'd moved after losing his original storefront. It turns out used book businesses were a reliable barometer of real estate that was underutilized, since they had very low sales per square foot.

His reactions to moving a fourth time were mixed. He thought the city would help him find a new location again and provide assistance to pack and move two floors of books. But the stock of suitable space in the city was going away. He was tired of moving, and each new location had added to his costs and reduced his foot traffic.

He moved to a much smaller location and, before too many years passed, closed down his shop.

Another retailer who sold unpainted furniture was suspicious of the city and opposed to the redevelopment, but eventually found a new storefront in the neighborhood. After operating there for two decades or more, it eventually moved to St. Louis Park and closed in 2004.

The University Avenue businesses face different development pressures from the light rail, since the surrounding real estate is not nearly as valuable as land next to the core downtowns. But small service businesses that rely on repeat customers are rightly concerned about how changes may affect them, and they are righteously angry that the needs of larger, non-taxpaying institutions are getting more attention.

Some of their businesses will die — either killed outright by construction, or more likely, by the combination of change and the owner's lack of skills or capital to adapt.

As I look back at the redevelopment that came into my old neighborhood, I see some fears were unrealized, while others were legitimate. Al Franken and other millionaires live where the bookstore once stood, but a fair amount of what we fought to save is still there. I can still see all three of the buildings where we once lived. One of the teachers at the shelter lives in a building next door, so I suspect the rents are still relatively affordable.

Though I miss parts of the old city and am repulsed by some of its replacement, I can't definitely say the old stuff was better than what we have now. Today is different, and that's the way life is.

Discussions about the Central Corridor Light Rail Line often fasten on what it will do to the sidewalks, street life and small businesses that currently hang on by a thread along University Avenue.

The plan does little to beautify the street, and some locals take that as a lack of respect for their community. In fact, it may just be a lack of public will to fund anything but the basics.

Ten days ago, I took a ride along parts of the avenue to look at what is there now. Some of these pictures are from a similar trip last year. [Click to enlarge.]

In particular, I wanted to take a closer look at Dickerman Park, perhaps the strangest and most neglected park in the Twin Cities. Its fate illustrates that vision can sometimes get ahead of will; and private generosity can be wasted just as easily as public spending.

In the third photo, I'm standing at one end of the park, looking east down its length, which runs along University between Fairview and Aldine.

The park was dedicated to the city in 1909 by the Griggs, Cooper & Company and Dickerman Investment for “park and parkway purposes”. However, since that time the property has been little used in the traditional sense of a park. Currently, the land is maintained by adjacent property owners and parking lots have been built on a portion of the park. To most, the land appears to be private property.

The Dickerman brothers' donation was not supplemented by city dollars or other private gifts, and the vision of University Avenue as a great boulevard expired right there. A few years ago, the neighborhood got behind a design effort to reclaim the park, it hasn't gotten much beyond the visionary stage, either.

Ironically, across Fairview is an abandoned eatery built in a converted service station. A mural depicts the former streetcar that stopped at this corner and served the historic Rondo neighborhood, which was taken in the late 1960's for construction of I-94. In its parking lot were the remains of some sort of picnic. No litter, just a swahili alphabet book and a foil tray of brats that still looked fresh enough to eat.

Just up the street is the headquarters for the Central Corridor project office. Around the corner from the mural was the former Fresh Anointing International Church, now ABC Mental Health.

My photos don't show street life, because there wasn't any.

If I must draw a point from all this, it would be: We have roughly used this street and this intersection for generations. A rail line might not mean salvation, but I don't think it can hurt.

Industry’s low rents mean that industrial enterprise will never qualify as what people in the real estate business call, in a cunning turn of phrase, a property’s “highest and best use,” meaning whatever yields the most profit.

It follows that if urban industry is to survive, not to say thrive, it needs protection from market forces. What it gets from smart growth—where it generally appears as a form of blight, when it appears at all—is greater exposure, leading to a vicious cycle: treating industry as a relic justifies the conversion of industrial land to other uses, thereby further weakening the possibility of industrial revitalization. And like farmland, once lost, industrial land is gone forever.

Just discovered this post was gobbled before it made it to the blog. Too busy to reconstruct my part of it, but here's the quote from Bill Lindeke that prompted some musings about adaptive reuse of our dying malls, foreclosed subdivisions and abandoned car dealerships.

Suburban growth seems like a terribly wasteful way to operate a
national economy. Much of the time, it means constructing brand new
homes, shopping centers, schools, and sewers at the outskirts of town
while simultaneously depopulating and tearing down homes, shopping
centers, and schools in the middle of the city or in the first-ring
suburbs. The network of real estate developers, banks, home
construction firms, food corporations, big boxes, and auto dealers line
US freeways in an endless loop of new construction and obsolescence,
peddling giant homes and an endless stream of shiny products that
nobody really needs... Is this really all we have to offer? Shouldn't
there be another way to make money? Isn't new retail development just
vulturing away the old retail development? Does economic growth have to come at the expense of our cities?

And here's another good read, about Surprise, Arizona, and how it illustrates how the housing boom went so wrong.

Generally, people move to a community for a specific reason -- jobs,
climate, scenery -- creating a demand for housing. If the demand
exceeds supply, then prices go up, and someone builds new houses to
meet the need. Something else seemed to be happening on the fringes of
Phoenix. Instead of being lured by jobs or amenities, people came in
large part because houses were relatively cheap. "Phoenix and Las Vegas
became the ultimate suburbs of Southern California," says Christopher
B. Leinberger, a real estate developer and visiting fellow at the
Brookings Institution, where he studies urban planning. "They became
the place for folks in California who could no longer afford the late
20th century American dream."

Just because a place is relatively cheap doesn't make housing
affordable, however. That brings us back to the Guerros. They wanted a
nicer house than they could afford, so their lender offered a solution:
An adjustable-rate mortgage. Their monthly payments were $2,700. Of
course, the bank would jack up their rates after two years, but it
didn't matter. With home values climbing steadily, they could refinance
before the rate reset, pull out enough cash to buy a jetski or a new
car, and keep their mortgage payments in check. In other words, the
banks were creating affordable housing where it didn't really exist;
with easy and tricky loans, they were creating purchasing power, or
demand. Tens of thousands of such loans were issued in Arizona, and the
major homebuilders even got into the game, offering financing in a
manner more often associated with car manufacturers.

This artificially inflated demand did the trick. In just five years,
Surprise gained another 50,000 people, and added more than 7,000 homes
in 2005 alone. Maricopa County -- which contains the bulk of the
greater Phoenix metro area -- grew faster than anywhere else in the
country, and the Phoenix area issued more than 62,000 residential
building permits. The economy responded: In 2006, Arizona's gross
domestic product grew by 6.7 percent, compared to 3.1 percent for the
nation as a whole. The construction industry provided 9 percent of all
non-farm jobs in Arizona, making it by far the biggest employer in the
state. Those jobs drew more people, who took out more loans to buy more
houses, creating more demand … you get the picture.

Housing prices soared -- nearly doubling, on average, over two years
-- to create almost instant wealth. Speculation was so rampant that it
threw population estimates for a loop. Last year, with the bust in full
swing, state and local officials discovered that their method of
counting people -- by starting with 2000 census numbers and then
estimating population using the number of houses built and sold --
didn't work. They had assumed an occupancy rate of 98 to 99 percent,
when in fact at least one of every 10 new homes was sitting empty, even
before the bust. A lot of people were making a lot of money. A lot of
people would lose money, too.

The concrete form at left was support for a trestle that once crossed Plymouth Avenue near the Mississippi. It lifts the ground well above the street grade where a wedge of isolated greenery grew in the semi-abandoned industrial landscape. A perfect place for a camp, close to town and the scrap yards, and out of sight.

Now, though, a new building is rising on the long-empty lot to the west. The unseen oasis is now a too-visible neighbor. So sleeping bags, blankets, shelter and clothing have been swept down to the sidewalk.

Across the city, a new light rail line is being planned to run through a faded neighborhood. New development, better services and more employment are promised (or at least dangled before the current residents).

In the long run, it may be so. But the blankets on the sidewalk and the underwear on the road sign are a reminder that, even with the best intentions, better is never better for everyone.